I remember my law-abiding child self reading the cover by-line: "For those who live in or long for the country" and thinking this was a requirement for subscribers. "Mommy, we don't live in the country, but I guess we long for it, don't we?" If so, we could read the magazine with a clear conscience.
We lived in a small brick house in a neighborhoodish part of town, where Main Street was in walking distance. Grandpa and Grandma lived in the country for real - the kind with pastures and cows. I lived for our annual visit to that gloryland of barn and garden. Not less charming was the laundry-hanging room near the attic stairs of the farmhouse. Old newspaper covered the wood floors under the clothespin dotted lines crossing the ceiling, and at the back was a tiny closet stacked feet high with more of those Reiman publication magazines. Grandma let me go to town in there with scissors, collecting pictures and recipes while I lost track of time.
When I was ten, and our family moved to Guyana, South America, some of those pictures went with me in scrapbooks and folders. As we lived in humid tropical towns and villages, surrounded by spiked fences, memories of a place where grass grew on hills and mowers trimmed its green plushness right to the edge of roads with no barred gates or sewage ditches stayed with me like a dream.
Life has been hard in the past few years, with illnesses and weariness. But sights like these irises by the shed remind me of those Country magazine pictures, and how God's love is shown to us in many ways.
When I was a teenager, and we were living in a village by the Berbice River, I found one of those old photos, children laughing in flowers and green grass next to a country lane. I almost wept over it. Then I remembered words from Hebrews, "If they had been thinking of that country from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. As it is, they desire a better country, that is a heavenly one."
I'm back in the country. That's God's grace. But oh, all I want now is that better country. That will be glory.
